


A Few Flowers at Her Feet

by Niobium



Series: Jane Foster Works [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Family, Gen, Jane Foster Loves Science, Jane Foster Week, Jane Foster and Science, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 02:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1572926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niobium/pseuds/Niobium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane's mother and father couldn't be more different, but they still have science in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Few Flowers at Her Feet

**Author's Note:**

> For Jane Foster Week over on Tumblr. Day 1 Prompt: Jane + Science.
> 
> I wanted to write something explicitly for the day's prompt, but I also wanted to look at Jane's history with science rather than current events. To the extent that we don't know hardly a thing about her mother or father, they're OCs.

***

When she was young—before her father passed away and before she was certain she’d be following in his footsteps as an astrophysicist and before Thor and wormholes and Malekith and all the rest—Jane had wondered over her mother and father’s compatibility. 

It was true they were both academics, but that was where, to her teen-aged mind, their coinciding interests stopped. Her mother was a historian; her father was a physicist and astronomer. Her mother, although no Luddite, was never in any hurry to move to the latest and greatest technology; her father always craved an upgrade. Her father would spend long hours in the lab or at a telescope or in front of a computer; her mother would be outside whenever the weather permitted it. It didn’t seem like they could be more different if they’d tried.

It had never occurred to Jane that they had science in common.

***

“We have to place it back facing the same direction and at the same root depth,” her mother said. Jane frowned.

“How can it tell the direction?”

“The portions of the plant which haven’t been facing the sun this whole time will get sunburn.”

“Can’t we just put a cloth over it to make some shade?”

“That’s only a temporary solution. We want it to be able to grow where we’ve placed it just like it did before.”

Jane peered closely at the trimmed up wisteria where it sat in the shadow of a Japanese maple in a temporary holding pot. The back yard fence, fifty years old and rotted and tilting drunkenly, was being replaced, and her mother had decided to take the opportunity to move her grandmother’s heirloom vine from its old spot at one corner to a more permanent location against the house, on a brand new trellis. 

Jane had assumed it would be no more involved than moving any plant could be—dig around it, protect the roots, find a new place, dig a new hole, place it in, cover the roots. Not so; the whole process had turned out to be ridiculously involved for her tastes. First they’d prepared the plant by watering it heavily for a handful of days. Today, Jane’s mother had spent the morning measuring and then digging a hole which was the exact same depth as the previous site. When Jane had been cajoled into helping her, they’d cut the branches and runners back to specific lengths, then they’d dug out the root ball and trimmed it to a certain percentage of the branch spread. And now this: it had to be replanted facing the same way. Her mother had marked the orientation with a few bits of colorful string.

In her fifteen-year-old hubris, Jane doubted most of this was required, and decided to say so. “I don’t think it can really tell, mom. I bet if we just plant it, it’ll be fine.”

“I promise you, it can. I nearly lost it when we moved here.”

That had been before Jane was born. She eyed the enormous pile of branches and runners, ready to be mulched, and tried to imagine the vine (which needed trimming every other day in high summer) as being something remotely resembling ‘lost’. She couldn’t see it, even humbled as it was now in the pot. “Really?”

“Oh yes. I thought I could just dig it out and plop it back down. It was almost dead before I found a gardener—Professor Hall from down the road, do you remember her?—who helped me save it. I was very lucky to meet her at the nursery. She was a botanist before she retired.” Her mother fingered one of the long, compound leaves. “To think, this plant has survived over forty years in our family, and I almost wiped it out by being arrogant and silly.”

Jane bit her lip and looked at all the plants around them. “Are they all that picky?”

Her mother just laughed. “Some, yes. Others you couldn’t kill if you tried. Can you fetch the Hoagland’s?”

Jane went to the storage shed and hauled out the heavy plastic container of liquid fertilizer. Her mother sloshed some into the new site and set it aside.

“Alright. Here we go.”

***

Her mother didn’t do anything remotely like ‘planned’ gardening, she just planted whatever she felt like, with the barest nod to the idea that some plants didn’t like to be next to others. (This was another thing she had in common with Jane’s father which Jane wouldn’t realize until she was older; he didn’t often plan his research, preferring to feel his way through it and let discovery guide him.) Tall bearded irises rubbed elbows with heavy-headed poppies; sweet peas wound up random sticks and hung down over wild strawberries and thyme; a stand of unruly black bamboo that her father complained about at least once a year sat at the south like a great barrier wall, edged in a haphazard collection of stones; cobra lilies and pitcher plants skulked in shady, wet spots, waiting for unwary insects. It looked positively wild, which was how her mother liked it. (And as long as there was open sky for the backyard telescope her father didn’t care either way—except for the bamboo.)

“All along the rocks, Jane. Don’t miss anything.”

“How does this even work,” Jane grumbled, and set the heavy cannister down to rest her arms. White and gray clouds, heavy with the promise of rain, threatened overhead. She thought she could smell rain in the air. “It’s just corn.”

“Corn gluten,” her mother corrected from where she was pruning back the amur chokecherry tree. “It’s called a pre-emergent. It prevents germination. So anything already growing is safe, but anything that’s still a seed doesn’t get started.”

“...so no weeds.”

“Exactly.”

Less weeds meant less _weeding_ , and Jane remembered (with no fondness) the _hours_ they’d spent kneeling on foam pads last year, digging out long, gangling, uninvited guests by their roots, so she hefted the container again. She’d overfilled it, something her mother had warned her about, and was feeling too proud to go and pour some back out into the huge, burlap sack in the shed. She had a lot of area to cover, and she needed to get it done before the rain started so that the water would soak the meal into the ground.

***

At night the garden and all its intricate rules sat dark and silent around she and her father while they looked through his backyard telescope at planets or stars or nebulae. The trees and shrubs blocked a great deal of light from neighboring houses, and provided the air of privacy her father preferred when they were stargazing.

“Sirius isn’t visible for part of the year, because it rises and sets while the sun is up, so we can’t see it. Fortunately, that’s not _this_ part of the year.”

Jane peered at the star in the telescope. Her father said, “It’s the brightest star in the sky when it’s out. It’s actually two stars—the great big giant you see, and then a much smaller, white dwarf orbiting it.”

“If we had a powerful enough telescope could we see the smaller one?”

“Certainly, but that would be a bit more expensive then I care to spend for my own private viewing, and I think your mother would rather replace the station wagon.” At Jane’s disappointed look, he said, “We’ll go view it at the observatory. Maybe this weekend, if it’s not raining.”

Jane tried to be patient. Why did everything have to wait for a weekend. “Can we look at Andromeda?”

Her father handed her the chart. “If you can find it,” he said, eyes bright with challenge.

***

“Bleach the sheers in between each cut,” her mother said as they split rhizomes. The tall bearded irises could get entirely out of control, and had to be thinned every other year; the rusty red ones were ridiculously prolific this season.

“Each cut?”

“We don’t want to spread soft rot. Anyone we give these to won’t thank us if we pass it on to them.”

Jane squinted at a mushy corner and snipped until she reached white, clean tissue, then dunked her clippers into the bleach bucket as instructed. “Isn’t it just from them being too wet?”

“Not the way you probably mean, Janey. It’s from a bacteria. We do need to put more sand in here to improve the drainage.” Which explained the big bag of it sitting to the side, ready to be mixed in when they replanted the irises they were keeping. “That will help keep the bacteria out. So will thinning these, so they’re not as crowded.”

“Can’t we just put antibiotics in the dirt instead?”

“No—you never know what else that might kill. And we don’t want to make them antibiotic resistant. The bleach does fine and doesn’t hurt the iris. We keep slugs and snails out with the iron pellets. When they injure the plant, that’s how the bacteria can get in.”

The pellets Jane had to spread around the irises once a week. It only took a few minutes, truth be told, so it wasn’t a terrible chore.

“And I need to dip the plant in bleach too?”

“Yes. Just a quick dunk on the rhizome, and then under the cloth in the shade. And don’t forget to tag it with the name. Mr. Feldmann wasn’t happy with those white ones he wound up with last year. He wanted orange. I may never live that down.”

***

“Mom, what are these?”

Her mother took one of the squash leaves Jane offered and held it up against the sun. The winding, coiling trails carved into the surface were intricate and almost pretty in a way, except for how Jane knew, just knew, that they didn’t belong.

“Leaf miners,” her mother said, and sighed. “I knew we shouldn’t have sprayed for those moths.”

“Shouldn’t have?” Jane echoed. Her mother nodded.

“Parasites and ants usually keep these little bastards under control. But we sprayed, and that may have killed off more than just the moths. If too many of their predators die, it can give them room to get going.”

Jane made a face. Her mother hadn’t wanted to handle the moth larvae with a pesticide, but it had seemed like the only option. “What do we do?”

Her mother tossed the leaf into the trash rather than the mulch bin. “Wait them out. More insecticides won’t help. The other bugs will come back and get them under control eventually. Hopefully I won’t lose _all_ of my squash in the mean time.”

***

“We can almost see some differentiation in the rings tonight,” her father said as he focused on Saturn. Jane stepped in to have a look, and sure enough, the dark and light bands were much easier to discern than they had been the previous week.

“What are they made of?”

“Ice and dust. And they’re much thinner than you’d expect.”

“How thin?”

“How thin do you think?”

Jane thought it over. “Ten miles,” she guessed.

“How about a mere thirty or so feet on average?”

Jane gave him a look of disbelief and peered back into the eyepiece. “But they look so big.”

“We’re seeing them at an angle. Edge-on, it’s quite a different story. Most things are, the more you dig into them—you just have to be willing to do the digging.”

***

Their last dinner outside on the back porch for the year was pork chops in citrus sauce, fried polenta with green chilies, a light salad, and limeade. The wisteria was responding well to its new home, and was just about done overtaking the trellis. The summer plants were down and trimmed back for the year, the maple leaves were turning, and the pumpkins and zucchini that had survived the leaf miners were about ready to be harvested.

Her father surveyed the bamboo with a critical eye. “Are you sure it’s not spreading?”

“It’s not, I had someone out to double-check the borders last week.”

Jane added, “And I looked for runners all around the yard.”

He subsided, looking only somewhat mollified. “It’s not natural, you know. For it to grow like that. How is the whole planet not covered with bamboo?”

“Oh, but it’s natural for you to read radio waves from space and discern a star’s composition from that alone?” her mother asked with an arched brow.

Her father opened his mouth, seemed to think twice about whatever he’d planned to say, and shut it. He sipped from his limeade. “I suppose it’s prettier than kudzu.”

“Such high praise.” Her mother offered Jane the last of the polenta, which she happily accepted. “You leave the science of our garden to me. I’ll leave the science of the sky to you.”

Her father sighed, his eyes still on the bamboo stand. “As long as it doesn’t block the telescope.”


End file.
